Daniel C. Burnston

Philosophers have a standard account of action and agency, which places propositional attitudes at the center of action explanation. On this view, decision happens in a space of psychologically represented reasons to which individuals have conscious access. In philosophy of mind, as well as in certain corners of the mind sciences, this idea is taken up in the notion of a representational hierarchy, with abstract propositional representations at the top, and detailed motor plans at the bottom. On this picture, deliberation and planning are person-level propositional processes taking place within a propositional form of representation, and the problem of action is the problem of how these states interact with motor representations and the body.

I think this view is empirically disproven -- although of course it takes a lot of interpretation of the psychological and neural data to get to that conclusion. I have begun work on a monograph that attempts to lay out these empirical arguments, and give a naturalistic account of action and agency based on the psychological and neural mechanisms at work. The key moves I make are to argue that (i) decision happens primarily in an embodied representational space, that is within sensorimotor systems, and (ii) that the core mechanism of decision is competition amongst neural populations representing distinct action outcomes. In the first part of the book I will lay out this view. In the second part I will apply it to discussions of action phenomenology, intentional explanation, and agency. In the third part I will use the account to analyze cases where agency is impacted, such as in compulsion disorders and trauma, as well as the role of societal imagery and affect in shaping our decisions.